Last Flowers

The last flowers of the season before Jack Frost's sneaky visit:

Milbert's Tortoiseshell Butterfly visiting the echinacea (purple cone flowers)

Purple cone flowers, sweet peas and blue sage's second blooms

My favourite gazanias, "Yellow Flame Big Kiss"

Huge Firebird cactus dahlias- I love this beauty!

Lavatara

We left for Thompson on Sept 23 and the 14 day forecast indicated that we would not get any frost until Oct 2.  Why, in heaven's name, did I believe that!?  We arrived home on Oct 1 to see that Jack Frost had indeed visited us at some point during our absence.  Luckily we had put all the potted tomato plants in the greenhouse before we left.  I had also dug up one of my regal geraniums and a lace leaf geranium and transplanted them into pots in the greenhouse. My hyacinth had started to come back to life in its pot and my amerylis was growing leaves. I moved them off the deck into the greenhouse as well .

Some of the tomato plants in the garden were fine and parts of others were wilted from the erratic, patchy frost that had come.  Most of the flowers in my deck pots were wilted, as well as the geraniums in the flower boxes on the stairs. The roots are still okay, though, so I am going to dig out a choice few to pot up and bring into the house to over-winter in my sunny bay window.  

It's a rather sad time of year when everything  that was so beautiful is dying. and there is so much work ahead to winterize my rose bushes, pull out spent annuals and clip off finished perennials. They say that you should leave some of your perennials alone and clip them in the spring instead. They look rather beautiful in the winter covered with snow. And it gives small wild creatures a place to shelter from the harsh weather... if you care about that kind of thing.... which I do. :)

Sept 21- Almost Autumn

The leaves are slowly turning color on the trees. I went for a walk along the trail to the beach today with Spirit , our dog and Lexy one of our cats.  I love the sound of the crunch of dry leaves under my runners and the twitter of the little chickadees in the tree branches. It was so quiet and peaceful! Not a soul was on the beach or on the water; no motors of boats and seadoos breaking the silence. Not one other human being on the shore as far as my eyes could see.

There were a few ducks bobbing around on the gentle waves, and our dog created a few ripples herself as she sat in the shallow water close to the shore. I sat at the picnic table there leaning my elbows on the top as I enjoyed the splendid view. Lexy sat under the picnic table in the shade patiently waiting for me to start back up the trail for home.

Buffalo Lake from Picnic Hill

It's September 21st and the temperature today reached 24 C! The rest of the week is supposed to be even hotter with +27 on Sunday! Not sure what's going on here with the weather. We have not had more than the tiniest skiff of a rain shower in the last 5 weeks!  The leaves are still mostly green and have only started turning color in a few spots. Maybe this unseasonable warm weather is confusing them into thinking it's not fall yet. (Technically the first day of fall isn't until Friday.)

 The lawn is turning brown in many places except for the part directly above the septic field. The flower beds are in constant need of watering. My Gardenia sprinkler is acting up and it doesn't want to ossilate anymore. It just sits there shooting sprays of water high in the air on the same spot.  I bought a new sprinkler in town this afternoon, a Yardworks this time and it ossilates just fine, but it hardly has any pressure at all and even on the 'large' setting it hardly wets very much.

Diligent husband checked all the hoses and settings and so on when he came home, but nothing seems to help. This Yardworks sprinkler is going back to the store. I knew I should have bought the one that is $10 more!

We are going away for a week to visit family in another province and I hate to leave my flower beds at Mother Nature's mercy. We have someone coming to feed the pets and water the tomato plants in the greenhouse, but when we planned this trip we weren't counting on anyone having to water the flower beds and veggie garden this late in September...  We usually have had a few frosts by now and most of the flowers would have been zapped. It's great to still have them looking so fabulous!

A male gold finch eating the seeds from the spent sunflowers

We have harvested most of the above ground veggies out of the garden, although there are still 6 tomato plants there ( as well as beets, carrots, potatoes and swiss chard.)  We harvested 7 little butternut squashes and 2 spaghetti squashes. Not a bad haul for a few seeds that I planted last March! :)

Happy fall clean up! :)

Fabulous New Greenhouse

Cedar frame and sides with polycarbonate panels

My new greenhouse is finished for the most part, thanks to my wonderful, diligent, talented husband, Chris!  There are no shelves or anything inside of it yet, and we still need to fashion a window to provide some relief from the heat. We hauled all 14 pots of tomatoes, big and small off the deck and they are happily sunning themselves in the greenhouse as we speak!

Smart husband put a big rain barrel under the garage down spout to collect the rain water there. It is quite full at this time and has provided watering cans full of warm rain water to nourish the hot tomatoes for 2 days now. I fill one of my big watering cans and it is enough for all the tomato pots in the greenhouse, so there’s not too much carrying of water involved, which is good. :)

The windows are made of polycarbonate, a 1/4 inch thick sturdy type of plastic made from recycled material with a 10 year guarantee which we got from a garden centre in Calgary, the Garden Retreat.  The lower part of the greenhouse frame is made of cedar logs which our generous neighbors, John and Christina  gave us. They were orginally half logs with dove tail ends salvaged from a cabin by  John and his father. Chris cut them straight into 4 by 4s with his saw and they add a fabulous smell to the inside of the greenhouse. The dimensions of my greenhouse are 8 by 10 feet, a perfect size.

My sweet husband is going to install an automatic system that works on the temperature to turn on the fan and open a window if it gets too hot, or turn on the heater if it gets too cold in the greenhouse. That’ll be great!  

I’m really looking forward to my very first greenhouse experience!  Next spring I will be able to start my tomato, squash and flower seedlings in there instead of cluttering up every surface in my living room, LOL!  It’ll be the perfect place to store bedding plants waiting to be planted out as well. 

We had a week of unseasonably hot weather for September and it got to be over 40C in the greenhouse. Had to water the poor overheated tomato plants twice a day. There are 15 pots of tomatoes in there which had been sunning themselves on our deck up until now. There are two types of beefsteak tomatoes, some Lemon Boy sweet yellow tomatoes and some Black Krim heirloom tomatoes. Two of these plants were store bought but the rest I started from seeds of tomatoes that we had eaten over the winter. For that reason I'm really pleased with how well they have grown. We have 6 more tomato plants growing in the garden. One is an Early Girl and it did get the earliest tomatoes which ripened first. Will definitely grow more Early Girls next year!

What am I going to do with all these tomatoes you might ask?  Well, we have had fried green tomatoes a couple times already and some of them have been ripening. They are so sweet straight off the vine! I will likely make some salsa and also give a lot of them away. Canning doesn't appeal to me, though. Seems too much like work! :)

Tomatoes, anyone?

September 1st, 2011 - Winding Down

Have been without internet service for over 10 days so this post is late in coming:

It’s September already! Where did the summer go?  Judging by the weather, which is fabulous, there’s still lots of summer left to experience. We are having hot sunny days with very little rain. That used to be the ‘normal’ summer weather here for the first number of summers, but in the last two summers we have had a LOT of rain, particularly this summer where we rarely went even 3 days without some kind of precipitation. 

We have however, been lucky out here at the south side of Buffalo Lake in that we have missed out on most of the hail! We did get a small amount twice, but my friend B in Red Deer had hail  8 or 10 times this summer alone!

Red Durango Marigolds

Some of my flower beds are no longer looking great, like my long bed where I clipped down all the maltese cross plants and the delphiniums to try and keep the reseeding to a minimum.  One lone little blanket flower at the far end of that bed is just starting to bloom. It doesn't get as much sun as the one in my round 'Angel bed'.  The sea lavender in my long bed still has a faint blur of tiny flowers on its tall stems to add a bit of color.  The lysemackia ‘creeping jenny’ has creeped its lime green tentacles  along the edges of that flower bed providing some great ground cover.

The tall false sunflower helianthus (or is it heliopsis, I’m never sure which to call it) in the middle of my round ‘Angel bed’ is still displaying a profusion of yellow multi-petaled blossoms.  

Arizona Sun Guillardia (blanket flower)

I cut back the monkshood and maltese crosses in that bed and the lilies are almost finished now. The Star gazer lilies are still looking fabulous!

Star Gazer lilies

The Arizona Sun guillardia (blanket flower) is full of beautiful sunny blooms and the annuals are looking great: gazanias, and lavataras especially. 

Gazanias

My cactus dahlias are impressively beautiful! There are 2 red ones, one in the angel bed, one in a pot on the deck. The most stunning one one though, is the orange/ yellow Firebird Dahlia in my old stack stone bed. 

Firebird Dahlias

In that stack stone bed the lavatara are looking great and the snapdragons started blooming again which adds a nice splash of color. The golden yellow Morden Sunrise rose is blooming in that bed for the third time this summer!  :)  

Speaking of rose bushes, on Aug. 31 we dug 2 small Manitoba Maple saplings out of my stack stone bed and I planted my “Love” hybrid tearose bush there. I hope that it likes its new home. It grew so fabulously well in the tiny pot which it was in all summer, providing me with 4 beautiful red and white roses. It is only a zone 4 rose bush, though, (and we are only Zone 3 here), so I will have to do an especially good job of providing winterizing protection to help it survive the cold winter weather we always get.

cactus dahlias

We planted the maple saplings in the wild brushy part of our acreage, behind the swing set.  (Many of the poplars there are dead or dying and we want to try and encourage more trees to grow to replace them. They provide privacy screening from the road, as well as dust collection from the dry gravel.)

Tall golden colored sunflowers have sprouted up in various beds, and some are gigantic! The biggest ones are in my new stack stone bed. I always try and imagine how those seeds came to be where they are, (since I didn’t plant them myself); It’s always a bit of a mystery. Most of the potted tomato plants on the deck also had sunflowers sprout in them so I know that those seeds must have originated in the Triple Mix soil bag. But who put them there??? I think it was one of the little rodents that live here in the environmental reserve around our yard...   

The rudbeckia are still fabulously gorgeous. The 'Autumn Colors' annuals are huge and the perennial Black eyed Susans are full of flowers this year. 

Rudbeckia "Autumn Colors"

 The echinacea coneflower that I planted 3 years ago are also finally blooming well. It takes about 3 years for them to really establish themselves, I understand. I had a few tries that didn’t make it, notably the ‘white swan’ variety of echinacea, but I have so many white shasta daisies that I don’t know why I tried to plant white coneflowers anyway... 

‘Nuff said!

Late Summer Flowers

Ozark Sundrops- a low growing perennial. It started blooming in its second year

This time of the year there is a lot of garden clean up to do. The daisies have mostly gone to seed as have the maltese cross, the delphiniums and the monkshood, not to mention the columbines. The roses need to be deadheaded, as do the early lilies that are finished blooming.
I try and deadhead my annuals every day as I pass by a pot of them on the deck or on my way down the outside deck stairs. If you keep the pansies and osteospermum daisies deadheaded they will continue to bloom all summer long. The same goes for the geraniums, of which I have many. The geraniums are looking spectacular right now, full of masses of flowers.

Its very gratifying to continue to see different perennials blooming in my flower beds . That's what every gardener strives for: having a flower garden where there is always something in bloom from early spring to late fall.  I planted some low growing Ozark Snow Drops last year ,but they didn't do much until a few weeks ago. They have the most beautiful bell shaped yellow blossoms. It was a wonderful surprise to come upon them one morning blooming quietly. :)

The hollyhocks are still blooming, but the flowers are mostly blooming at the tops of the tall stems now as the rest lower down have gone to seed.  The lone hollyhock plant in my stack stone bed is about a week behind the rest and still looking healthy and lovely, aside from a few lacylike chewed leaves, thanks to the slugs, and thanks indirectly to all the rain we have had since spring....

'Autumn Colors' Rudbeckia

The late summer flowers are looking really good. The rudbeckia "Autumn Colors" are full of flowers, especially the ones that got nibbled off early in the planting season. (Not sure if it was the deer or the marmot that was responsible.) That's proof positive that one should snip annuals down after planting them, something that I find so hard to do. Snipping off perfectly good flowers seems to be such a dumb idea when you have waited all through the long winter for flowers to bloom in the garden.

My Lavatara has FINALLY started to bloom! They were so tiny when I planted them and some of them didn't survive the transplanting. (Lavataras are finicky.) But the ones that did are opening their blossoms now and should bloom until frost.

7 foot tall helianthus

My tall helianthus (also sometimes called heliopsis) in the middle of my angel bed are still looking great. I love their multi-petalled yellow pom pom shaped bossoms. :)  I had to re-tie them though. Many of the stems had grown outside of the stakes and the strings that I had tied them with.  What a job!

helianthus 'pom pom' blossoms

Note to self: Next year, check the helianthus as it is growing and move the stakes as needed, before they get 7 feet tall!

heliopsis- false sunflower shorter variety

I think I will have to dig some of it out and give it away at the Plant Swap in May before it takes over that whole bed.

Gaillardia -Blanket flowers 

Another note to self: Dig out some of the delphiniums and the maltese crosses in the angel bed or move the blanket flowers out 12 inches.  Also, remember to give the dahlias and the foxgloves more room to grow. The Baby's Breath needs to be cut back or some of it dug up as well. My poor dahlias are growing at a 45 % angle due to being crowded out.  They are a beautiful red cactus blossom  and still looking wonderful!

I'm enjoying some late blooming lilies and the Stargazers are promising to be big and gorgeous, if the size of the buds are an indication... Looking forward to their spectacular blooms! 

Gazanias - continue to bloom and look fabulous

Dahlias, Lilies and Pests

Cactus Dahlia

This amazing cactus dahlia is 10 years old! I bought the tuber many years ago and each year I dig them up after the frost has killed the plants and  I over-winter them in the laundry room in bags of peat moss. The following spring, I plant them in a pot of soil and they start growing again.  The other half of the tubers are growing in my 'Angel bed', but the buds have not opened yet. That dahlia plant has a huge Baby's Breath next to it, hogging much of the sunlight. Next spring I will have to find it a more generous spot to grow in.

My favorite 4-legged companion

Flower box- pink geraniums, blue pansies, white lobelia and creeping jenny- lysemackia

Lexy relaxing in the shade

False sunflowers, another late summer perennial easy to grow.

This false sunflower is quite small compared to the giant growing in the middle of my round Angel bed. That heliopsis is over 7 feet tall! Next spring I will have to dig some of it out and give it away at the spring plant swap, or move the stakes back and re-tie it. It has outgrown it's confines and some of it is hanging down over other not quite as tall perennials.

oriental pink lilies

I love these pink oriental lilies. Such a fabulous color! Thanks to Bobbex, the deer have only eaten 3 of my lilies this year. My Stargazer lilies in my stack stone bed have big buds on them now and should be blooming soon as long as I keep them sprayed...

My white daisies are mostly finished blooming now and I have been deadheading them regularly to avoid a massive takeover in the spring. The Maltese Cross in my rock garden have all gone to seed now, too, so I cut the stems down to about half their size last evening.  Also yanked out copious amounts of tall quack grass hiding in among my tall perennials. Today I trimmed off a number of Maltese Cross in my round 'Angel bed' as well as some of the monkshood which is going to seed.

The Delphiniums are next!

The ugly part of gardening: pest control!
Tiny caterpillars had infested my red current bush and had a hay day there. More like a "hay week",  I think! They almost stripped every leaf off the entire bush!  The week before that, I  had discovered masses of aphids underneath the upper leaves of the same shrub, so I clipped off all the upper leaves,  then sprayed the entire thing with insecticidal soap, thinking I had the problem beat. Riiiight!

I also noticed that something in my flower beds were making lacy holes in the leaves of many of my flowers, notably the sunflowers. Many of the smaller ones in my stack stone bed had no leaves left at all. I discovered the culprits yesterday evening, after the sun had gone around to the other side of the house and it had cooled off. There were about a dozen slugs there, one on each sunflower, merrily munching away oblivious to my angry glare. I picked the leaves that they were sitting on and squished them....

I have to spray some Neem Oil on the plants in that bed to deter any other nasty creatures, but rain was forecast for tonight which would mean re-applying it tomorrow, so I will wait till then.

Hollyhocks & Clematises

Hollyhocks and clematis are both types of perennials. They both like sun, but do not like to dry out.

Hollyhocks are short-lived plants, but if you let them drop seeds in the fall, you will always have a few new plants. I usually collect and keep some of the seeds to start a few plants in the house in the spring. Then I plant the seedings in the spaces in the flower bed where any of my other hollyhocks didn't come up.

Hollyhocks

This spring I found a hollyhock growing in the vegetable garden and another one in a bad spot in one of my other flower beds (my "Angel bed"). I dug both of them up and moved them to my hollyhock bed next to the house. One of them had bare roots, but I watered it well and eventually it started to grow.

More Hollyhocks

Another thing to keep in mind, Hollyhocks are actually a type of biennial. That means that in the first year seedlings do not grow very tall, nor do they flower till the second year.

General Sikorska clematis on right -light mauve flowers / Jackmanii on left- dark purple flowers

 Clematises like sun but prefer to have 'cool feet'. It's a good idea to mulch them well and to plant a shorter perennial or annual right in front of them. I have some black-eyed susans growing directly in front as well as some blue petunias. and a pink oriental poppy.

4 petal mutant Jackmanii flower

Jackmanii flower opening

General Sikorska light mauve flowers

Clematis vines need a trellis or something tall to climb on. The General Sikorska and the Jackmanii are both hybrid clematises. Their vines die back over winter, but I don't cut them off until spring because sometimes they don't die entirely.  They need to be kept well watered even in the fall.

Once established, clematises and hollyhocks have a beautiful, stunning display of flowers from mid summer till end of September and are well worth the effort to grow.